Awake in This Life

My first day of kindergarten was interesting. I wasn’t yet five years old, and as my parents began to leave me in my new classroom, I noticed that my mother was crying. Why in the world would she do that? I wondered. As time progressed, so too did the depths of our dinner conversations, and since the school was parochial, I eagerly shared biblical stories with my parents that had been offered up in class. I remember being obsessed with the stories of Jonah inside the whale, Job’s really bad luck, Abraham nearly killing his son, and especially Cain beating down his brother Abel. This last story had real significance since I was always beating down my brother Mark, and I was worried that I might be punished by God if I wasn’t careful. How scary it all was, and yet for some reason I couldn’t get enough of it.

What really shook me, however, was the 23rd Psalm’s phrase, “I shall not want.” I spent my days wanting all sorts of things, which couldn’t be good if the Bible was always right. If only I’d known that in Hebrew the words were lo echsar, which translates to something close to “I shall not lack,” I might not have been so judgmental of myself. Regardless, the idea that I shouldn’t want led to tremendous guilt on my part and an interesting teachable moment for my mom and dad.

As it turned out I was afraid because I really wanted the new Munster’s lunchbox. Since wanting went against this teaching, I thought that there was little doubt that I was going to burn in hell. At least that was my interpretation of my teacher’s evaluation of the Bible. My parents tried to play both sides by telling me that it’s important to be satisfied with what we have, but that it’s fine to wish for things. But then they confused me when they told me that hell doesn’t exist unless you create it for yourself—pretty Zen for a couple of Protestants! The next thing I remember, I was going to a different school where I got to play with frogs, worms, clay, and I got to learn about dinosaurs. While I never did get the Munster’s lunchbox, I was given an amazing introduction to my spiritual life, since my parents taught me about how to hold off on judging myself as a way to avoid suffering in a self-created hell.

Without any formal training in the teachings of Enlightenment, my mom and dad were Buddhas in this moment. They pointed out that “not wanting” (or at least knowing that I was not lacking) is the key to freeing ourselves from the tangle of judgment and evaluation. When we can recognize these traps and snares, we can uncover a deep satisfaction. Wanting is absolutely normal. Spiritual enlightenment, on the other hand, is anything but normal. We have all of this biological apparatus affixed to our bodies that supports our cravings as well as our revulsions. This constant leaning back and forth into and away from whatever we judge to be valuable or unsightly is the main activity of being a person driven by egoic attachment. We do this all the time, but this is just our habitual inertia. Getting free of it and eventually embodying something much greater takes a deep commitment to stillness. If we don’t move, we inevitably come to the realization that there is a space between our judgments that offers the amazing expanse of Freedom. In this expanse we suddenly lose the need to insist on anything being a certain way. We suddenly find that we have nothing to complain or kvetch about since everything points us into the confluence of those streams that flow directly into our deepest, most sacred sense of wonder. As we begin to find comfort in this wonder, it becomes our home. In this home we find ourselves Awake in this life.